


In The New City

by GretchenSinister



Series: GretchenSinister's Blacksand Halloween [2]
Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Grief/Mourning, M/M, for Sandy anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:01:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23234389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Blacksand Halloween Day 2: Under your bedThis story is kind of sad for Sandy, I don’t know why that was what came out. Sandy puts away his old baby blanket and the darkness reaches out to hold his hand.
Relationships: Pitch Black/Sanderson Mansnoozie
Series: GretchenSinister's Blacksand Halloween [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1670500
Kudos: 7
Collections: Blacksand Short Fics





	In The New City

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 10/30/2014.

It’s lonely in the new city. Maybe that’s good, he thinks. He imagines himself landing in the city like a falling star. Sure, really he’s just a meteorite, a chunk of rock, but everyone who sees him will think of him as a star, and no one’s going to find where he landed without some serious effort.

These are the things he thinks about, in his small apartment, as he drinks coffee and watches the sun hit the tops of the shining glass buildings that house thousands of tech jobs, then the eternally green hills around them, then the highway, then everything else.

He won’t be looking for one of those jobs in those shining buildings. Not now. If he lives in his small apartment and takes the advice of an efficient man five states away, now, he can get by on the inheritance and the insurance.

He is very young to have an inheritance.

Sometimes, when he remembers that the inheritance paid for the coffee he’s drinking, he has to pour it down the drain. Sometimes, he has to drink it all at once, so that it burns him.

He lets himself do both things without pretending he’s doing anything else. In this city, this is possible. There may be more high-rise condos in this city than there were before, and the highways may be nightmares of heat and stillness, but it is still a city full of more live people than the one he left. More is permitted, including a certain amount of coffee-flavored drama.

Still, Sandy is lonely in the new city.

One day, when he is cleaning his room from the first debris of his meteorite landing, he straightens the blankets on his bed enough to notice a lump in the corner of the duvet cover he’s been using with no duvet in it.

Of all the things it could possibly have been, it’s nothing more, nor less, than his childhood blanket. The blue stripes on one side and the polka dots on the other are scarcely darker than the white background, and the smiling lions and giraffes amid the stripes and polka dots are apparent more as blank breaks in the patterns. It’s repelled monsters for over two decades.

Sandy rolls it up carefully and puts it on a shelf in his closet. After all, there’s nothing to be afraid of anymore. It's already happened.

That night, he wakes to realize he’s thrown his arm over the side of the bed, in protest of the heat he still hasn’t gotten used to. There’s a hand in his own. Bony. The fingertips feel like claws, but they don’t dig in. The skin feels sort of like a stingray that brushed up against him once, on vacation.

He laughs until he can’t breathe. It hurts; he’s out of practice. The hand tightens. “What are you doing? Can’t you feel it?” The strange voice sounds nice to Sandy; nice, and offended.

“Of course I can, you’re holding my hand!” Sandy laughs again.

“No! The nightmare! Wait—you can feel my hand? You can see me? Hear me?”

“I can’t see anything with the blackout curtains,” Sandy says. “But why wouldn’t I be able to hear you or feel you? You’re real, right?”

“I—I’m the boogeyman,” says the voice, sounding confused. “But, this can’t be right. You put away your blanket. You’re fair game and…why aren’t you afraid?”

“Does putting away the blanket mean I’m all grown up?” Sandy asks. He goes on quietly, as if he’s talking to himself. “I guess I am. I didn’t want to be. But…I guess I am. I can’t call my mom anymore. I can’t call my dad. I suppose I should be afraid. This is the longest conversation I’ve had in weeks.”

“Well.” The hand still doesn’t let go. “Me, too.”

“You know I think I kind of expected you?” Sandy says. “That a monster would come with the blanket gone. So you’re not a surprise, and not so scary. And I like knowing that the world isn’t just what we always see.”

The hand squeezes his. “I’ve never thought about myself that way before.”

“I’ve had a lot of practice recently thinking about things I wasn’t expecting to,” says Sandy.

The boogeyman stays till first light, and Sandy doesn’t mind not talking during the day. He’s saving his words up for the thing under the bed. The thing who comes back. The unstoppable thing. The immortal thing.

He likes the sound of that.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments from Tumblr:
> 
> sylphidine reblogged this from gretchensinister and added:  
> This is only the second time I have ever burst into tears reading a fanfiction.[I’ve read things on several occasions that have brought me to tears as in a slow leak, or have left me empty and sad, but “bursting into tears” is another level altogether.]
> 
> bowlingforgerbils said: My face looks like it can’t make up its mind between smiling and crying after reading this.
> 
> tejoxys said: My reaction to this fic is that I want to hug it.
> 
> marypsue reblogged this from gretchensinister: #I'm not crying you're crying


End file.
